The diffusion of the Coase theorem into the economics literature has many facets, one of which lies in its use and treatment by environmental economists. This paper examines the first two decades of this history, a period during which the theorem's validity was widely acknowledged but its...

Pigou (1920) advocated for taxes, set equal to marginal damages, on goods produced and consumed that involve negative externalities. Samuelson (1954) laid out the conditions for optimal pure public goods provision, but noted that free-riding (the “demand revelation” problem) was likely to...

Na and Shin (1998) showed that the veil of uncertainty can be conducive to the success of self-enforcing international environmental agreements. Later papers confirmed this negative conclusion about the role of learning. In the light of intensified research efforts worldwide to reduce...

This paper examines the two externalities that a country's environmental regulation imposes on other country's welfare: an environmental externality, due to transboundary pollution, and, a competitive advantage externality, as regulations affect domestic firms' abatement costs, which impact the...

Many economics texts cover the economics of controlling negative production externalities. Most authors introduce their analysis by examining a tax on the output of polluting firms, sometimes called a "simple Pigovian tax." They then often point out that taxing pollution directly is more...

The extent of genetic diversity in food crops is important as it affects the risk of attack by pathogens. A drop in diversity increases this risk. Farmers may not take this into account when making crop choices, leading to what from a social perspective is an inadequate level of diversity

We adopt a stepwise approach to the analysis of a dynamic oligopoly game in which production makes use of a natural resource and pollutes the environment, starting with simple models where firms' output is not a function of the natural resource to end up with a full-fledged model in which (i)...

Climate mitigation policy should be imposed over a long period, and spur development of new technologies in order to make stabilization of green house gas concentrations economically feasible. The government may announce current and future policy packages that stimulate current R&D in...